Camels and Comittees

RANT #9: The sorriest statement made by my sole commentator was "Gone are the days of the lonely patent clerk." This is an obvious reference to Einstein when he was working on the special theory of relativity. From what I've read he was never lonely but in fact was a self promoter - the horn of plenty being the one you blow yourself. The sorrow is in the "group think" attitude. I do not believe there was ever an idea generated by more than one person. Of course once the idea is launched it can be worked over by other minds - that's where we find that a camel is a horse put together by a committee. I'm no patent clerk just a retired professor who has tried not to be lonely by reaching out to those whom I thought would be interested in my findings. What I really thought would happen is that the professor would give one of his post-docs or graduate students the paper to criticize. The professor himself is the money wrangler managing an empire and who assesses the accomplishments of his underlings. I have come to the conclusion that these empires are counter productive generating a lot of trivial publications that shouldn't see the light of day until they can be formed into a whole. A professor should do his own research because it's an humbling experience and prevents pedantry. But these empire builders themselves are judged not by the quality of the work (there's the minimum set by the editors - tempered by the old boy's club) but by the quantity. Truth be told I would think the ideal job would be at a liberal arts college (of course every one of them now parades as a university) where the research could be pursued individually and publication could wait until it's ready. I've met more genuinely intellectual people on the faculty there than in university where they have become so specialized they can't afford the time away from "playing the game." I might as well add that I think the undergraduate students at the so-called research universities are getting screwed. Their classes if small are taught by instructors who are also in graduate school, a cut above a teaching assistant, or by those locally renowned professors in lecture halls of 500. The research university, to harken back to Eisenhower at the end of his presidency, is part of the military-industrial complex. I can remember as a sophomore (1954) when I started a subscription to Chemical and Engineering News as a student member of the American Chemical Society the big story was whether the federal government should have a hand a funding scientific research (there were pros and cons) through the National Science Fouundation - we've come a long way baby!